Mark Twain: A Biography, by Albert Bigelow Paine

Chapter CCXVI

Riverdale — A Yale Degree

The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street. They spent a week in Elmira at the end of September,
and after a brief stop in New York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at
Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home. They had permanently concluded not to return to Hartford. They had
put the property there into an agent’s hands for sale. Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the
house again.

They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration. They decided that they must have easy access to the
New York center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and
light. The Appleton homestead provided these things. It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one
of the Morris family, so long prominent in New York history. On passing into the Appleton ownership it had been
enlarged and beautified and named “Holbrook Hall.” It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades. It had associations: the
Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been
entertained there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. The great hall of
the added wing was its chief feature. Clemens once remembered:

“We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that
house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had two great
fireplaces in it, that settled it.”

There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize
upon that household the home there might have been ideal. They loved the place presently, so much so that they
contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson
shore. They were anxious to have a home again — one that they could call their own.

Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a
liberal-minded minister with whom Clemens easily affiliated. Clemens and Carstensen visited back and forth and
exchanged views. Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the
Reverend Gottheil, a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the Confucian faith, after which
they were all going to a Yiddish theater. Clemens said:

“Well, there’s only one more thing you need to make the party complete — that is, either Satan or me.”

Howells often came to Riverdale. He was living in a New York apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and
pleasant outing for him. He says:

“I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they
used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end
of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of
their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New-Year’s; he hastened to say that a
horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to
their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge
after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. But the
good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found
ourselves again in our middle youth.”

Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year and went over in October to receive their
degrees. It was Mark Twain’s second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American institution of learning
could confer.

Twichell wrote:

I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and
emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at
all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with
which you are identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though
for themselves they don’t like ’em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever.
Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters,
and so, as I say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality.

Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep
them at home.

I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I
have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are your plans for getting
left, or shall you trust to inspiration?

Their plans did not avail. Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to receive their honors.

When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank:

DEAR SIR — I have long been an admirer of your complete works, several of which I have read, and I am with you
shoulder to shoulder in the cause of foreign missions. I would respectfully request a personal interview, and if you
will appoint some day and hour most inconvenient to you I will call at your baronial hall. I cannot doubt, from the
account of your courtesy given me by the Twelve Apostles, who once visited you in your Hartford home and were mistaken
for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will be mutually agreeable.